This album being fucking amazing reminded me of the shit I got for putting Gaslighter on our most-anticipated list back in February.
Yeah, a lotta people (men) are instantly dismissive about this band and it bums me the fuck out. Even the Stereogum comments were pretty bad on the article they posted about the album being available to stream.
Yeah, there are preconceived biases against them that go back a long, long way. When I was growing up, it definitely wasn't "cool" to be a boy who liked a band called Dixie Chicks. Or really to listen to female artists at all. I'd like to think those narrow ways of thinking about music have been dismantled a bit, but I think some people still (consciously or unconsciously) lean back on their biases about female artists that were really big in the 90s and especially the 2000s. The sad part is how much it's improved from the AbsolutePunk days...
I still have to do a double-take every time I see Ariel Rechtshaid's name in the credits of huge albums, haha.
Yeah I checked her out for the first time the other day after hearing her briefly on the Scrubs rewatch podcast. She's really good.
She's only released a few songs in the last couple years so I definitely think she's saving up for A BIG debut album
How on earth has Natalie's voice managed to stay exactly the same for 20 years? Seriously incredible vocals on this record. Her tone has not aged a bit
This album is really something. I strongly relate to what @Craig Manning was saying about liking this band as a male growing up. I grew up in a household that only listened to country music, and this was the one band I gravitated toward. I always knew they were different. There weren’t many bands comprised of females (and I say bands, not groups), and their mastery of their instruments has always been a huge draw for me. They were my first concert way back on the Fly Tour when I was about 10 or 11 (1999 maybe?). Once I had my musical awakening toward the end of high school, and especially in college, I found my true love for music which leaned heavily toward alt rock/indie (big follower of ap.net back then), but this is the one band that I’ve stuck with from my childhood. As my musical tastes developed, some things kind circled back a little with my favorite artists being people like Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers (far too many more to mention, but you get the idea). It’s sort of amazing to me that the sound of the music isn’t all that different, yet they’re in such different worlds. Having been a huge fan of Jack’s stuff for a long time, I remember seeing Natalie post about being at one of his shows a while back, then she was featured on a Terrible Thrills album. I had this hope that they might work together for an album one day, and was so excited when they ended up doing that. Their last album came out the year before I graduated from high school. I’ve stuck by as a fan all this time, seen them on all their major tours, and here I am in 2020 - finished grad school at the end of last year, thankful to have a decent job, and this band drops such a great album. They’re basically the one thing that he stuck with me as far back as I can remember, and I’m grateful for that.
I def need to get into their older stuff more, for whatever reason Shania and Faith were the only country people who made a pop crossover enough for me to be exposed to them, besides Landslide I was too young to listen to them when they were huge but yeah this is great
Jack is all over this haha. I like it on first listen and I really only know Goodbye Earl outside of this album